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« set in a russian village during world war one, « okraina » is barnet’s first sound picture, and as in some other early russian talkies – alexander dovzhenko’s « ivan », vsevolod pudovkin’s « the dezerter », dziga vertov’s « entuziasm » – the stylized sound track is highly inventive and original. within the first few moments cheers are synchronized with blasts of steam from a train engine, the sound of a roomful of cobblers hammering away at shoes registers like a bit of electronic music, and there’s even a horse that briefly speaks – a trope that’s easy to associate with dovzhenko’s silent pictures.

\the sound in « okraina » has the curious, primal effect of redefining silence, as if we’d never experienced it before – a virtue that’s especially striking in relation to current movies, in which silence of any kind is a rarity. by punctuating extended stretches of silence with whizzing or whistling and then the sounds of explosions, barnet sensitizes our ears as well as our nerves, and he rarely allows the dialogue to carry the story. there’s nothing intellectual or obtrusively formal about his decision to accord sound and image equal importance. this is a volatile film full of raw emotions, and as russian film historian jay leyda once put it, ‘you can’t be sure whether the next scene will be funny or pathetic, gentle or violent.’

\this is the kind of movie in which a soldier can play dead in the trenches as a practical joke, fooling us as well as his buddies, and where a young russian woman can fall hopelessly in love with a german prisoner with whom she can barely communicate. comic scenes can suddenly turn tragic, and vice versa. one melancholy long shot of a brooding soldier and a brooding woman seated on opposite ends of a bench ends with a gag: when the soldier stands up, the woman, as if on a seesaw, sinks. seemingly irrational shifts in mood and plot ultimately create a profound sense of war as a state of chaos. (some commentators have suggested that barnet’s implicit pacifism led to his being accused of inaccurately portraying russian life.) in some montage sequences, images of warfare go by so quickly they seem to pile on top of each other, and after a character rushes into a meeting to announce that the czar has abdicated, the senseless fighting doesn’t stop (…)»